Ganser’s Syndrome (first described by the German psychiatrist Sigbert Ganser [1853–1931]) is a relatively rare reaction pattern also known as “the syndrome of approximate answers.” It occurs primarily in prisoners awaiting criminal trial, and secondarily in patients under examination for commitment to mental institutions. The answers these individuals give are always related to the question, but at the same time are absurd or beside the point. Authorities disagree as to whether Ganser’s Syndrome is a psychosis, a psychoneurosis, or the result of low mentality. That it has a psychotic flavor cannot be denied, and some investigators suggest that the loss of rationality is an unconscious attempt to reject the total self and its life history.
Ganser’s Syndrome is a variety of what is generically termed paralogia. False, illogical thinking, found particularly in schizophrenic reactions. That conversation on Death Row came back to me as I read TV Guide’s June 5–11 issue. Paralogia. We go step-by-step. Follow me, if you will.
I quote from THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR: “Paralogical thinking may take many forms. A subject who is preoccupied with his own subjective thoughts and fantasies may give answers that reflect his interests and attention narrowed to a point where his thinking becomes restricted and unrealistic. Some subjects draw false inferences to protect themselves from the truth. In one case a schizophrenic patient learned that his girl friend, with whom he had never had intercourse, had become pregnant. He immediately concluded that the conception was immaculate, that the girl was the Virgin Mary, and that he himself was God. Paralogia may also take the form of distorting reality to conform to personal desires or delusional ideas. If a nurse smiles at a schizophrenic patient it may be enough to convince him that she is his mistress. If a paranoid sees two people looking his way while conversing, he is apt to conclude that they are talking about him, to his detriment. Paralogical thinking is sometimes described as prelogical or paleological thinking, since the thought processes are similar to those found in children and primitive man.”
Accepting this theory, paralogia represents a regression to the stage in human development when the mind was dominated by feeling and perception rather than by logic and reasoning.
Remember that. By the end of all this it will tie in with the horrors of the Me Decade, est and Lifespring and transactional analysis and Scientology and Skinnerian behavior modification. But most of all with Walter Annenberg, Ronald Reagan, anti-intellectualism and the insidious, omnipresent, socially corrosive indoctrinaire power of TV Guide in aid of reactionary attitudes for the past thirty years.
What we have this installment is an attempt at rational thought—not my natural tongue—as opposed to hysterical screed, in the latter of which, some of you have suggested, it is that I indulge too frequently in it, which. That. Let’s see how well you respond to painstaking ratiocination.
Back to paralogia. As exemplified by a letter from one of this column’s readers, who pilloried me for my attack on Brian De Palma’s films, featuring gratuitous and graphic brutality against women, on the grounds that The French Connection was a film filled with violence, where a cop commandeers a car from an innocent motorist, chases a criminal through the streets of New York, smashes other cars en route, almost runs down a plethora of pedestrians, and then wrecks the guy’s car. Paralogia. What the one film has to do with the others, I do not know. There is no approval (or even mention) of The French Connection in my essays; the appropriation of a car in the heat of pursuit bears no relation to sticking an icepick in a woman; paralogical thinking strikes again.
A similar reordering of reality manifested itself in TV Guide June 5–11. On page A-2 of the Los Angeles Metropolitan edition we find the usual editorial “As We See It.” While it was very likely not written by the President of Triangle Publications, Inc., publishers of TV Guide, the honorable Walter H. Annenberg, it damned well straight reflects his thinking, and has done so for three decades. Let me quote, in part, from that editorial.
“Ed Asner, the outspoken actor who stars as tough-talking editor Lou Grant, recently denounced, with soapbox bombast, CBS’s cancellation of his series. ‘…I find it shallow that the network wouldn’t have exerted itself on behalf of the show, especially so that the yahoos of the world couldn’t claim another victory in their attempt to abridge free speech.’ Whoa, let’s back up there a minute, Ed…Lou Grant, good as it once was…in 45th place is where you were likely to find Asner’s series…As for the ‘yahoos,’ Asner obviously meant those poor, misguided souls who had the temerity to object to, among other things, his pledge to raise $1 million to buy medical supplies for leftist guerrillas in El Salvador.
“More recently, Asner has even accused the White House of putting political pressure on CBS to cancel his series. Asner must be suffering delusions of grandeur if he thinks this Nation’s leaders have no more important matters to worry about than a foundering series or its egotistical star…. This, Ed, makes you the biggest yahoo of them all.”
Before I take you to the very next page of that issue of TV Guide to tie the paralogical knot, let us examine the suppositions presented as fact in that little snippet of editorial. First, the yahoos of whom Asner spoke are clearly and obviously the minions of Falwell, Wildmon and the other cadres of the Repressive Fundamentalist Right. The Moral Majority yahoos who’ve been so busy attenuating freedom of speech all across the board, from pushing creationism to pulling books from public libraries to having schoolteachers fired for dissenting views. Second, the souls who objected to Asner’s humanitarian efforts are neither poor nor misguided. They are powerful corporations like Kimberly-Clark, the Kleenex sponsor that withdrew its spots from Lou Grant, one can properly conjecture, because it operates a large factory in El Salvador. And third, how outrageously paranoid is it for stupid, uninformed, egotistical Ed Asner to suspect that “this Nation’s leaders” spend their spare time harassing those who speak out. How foolish of him to think that the chivvying of Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman or Marlon Brando might preshadow what’s happened to him. How egomaniacal of him to think that the government’s smear campaign of Jean Seberg, that drove her to suicide, might indicate a capacity for malice on the part of this Nation’s leaders. How self-centered of him to remember all the people blacklisted during the HUAC and Joe McCarthy eras. How shallow of him to think that this Nation’s leaders, knowing of J. Edgar Hoover’s endless harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., no doubt creating a climate in which the likes of a James Earl Ray would pull the trigger, and doing nothing to stop it, might suggest a Nation’s leaders who are capable of sicking the dogs on an actor who has the temerity to exercise his First Amendment right to speak out. Yeah, what a paranoid, ego-crazed yahoo Ed Asner is.
And what a horrifying example to the rest of us. We smaller fish are supposed to be scared shitless. If they can wound someone as securely positioned as an Asner, what the hell chance have we minnows got? The chance of a snail in a bucket of salt. The chance of a snowball in a cyclotron. That is called terrorization by example.
And the example is brought home to us forcibly by TV Guide, Mr. Annenberg’s mouthpiece with a circulation of 17 million weekly, the largest selling magazine in America…where paralogia rears its cockeyed head on page A-3, chockablock with the editorial telling Ed Asner that he’s a yahoo because he thinks his show was cancelled by this Nation’s leaders, when it is obvious that the show was cancelled because it was in 45th place out of 108 programs in the Nielsen ratings.
On page A-3 the New York bureau chief of TV Guide, Neil Hickey, trumpets as follows: “Taxi lives! The Emmy-award-winning series that ABC recently cancelled has been retrieved from the ash heap by NBC, dusted off and will grace that network’s lineup with freshly minted segments sometime next season…Taxi’s fans were desolate when ABC dumped the series, which has generally gotten high marks from critics as one of primetime television’s less banal offerings. But its numbers slumped to 26 percent of the audience last season, and the show ended up in 53
rd place…”
Do you perceive the manifestation of paralogical thinking? On the left-hand page Lou Grant was cancelled because it was in 45th place, and it serves the dumb CommieSymp Asner right for shooting off his big bazoo…and on the right-hand page Taxi has been “retrieved from the ash heap,” “dusted off,” and “will grace” with “freshly minted segments” next season’s primetime viewing. But Taxi was in 53rd place!
Now I think Taxi deserves to be saved, as well as does Lou Grant. Both are series of merit. I make no quibble with the good sense of NBC in restoring it to the air, though NBC’s decision not to pick up Lou Grant may also say something about the overall situation.
You see, TV Guide on the right-hand page goes into panegyrics about how Emmy-winning has been Taxi’s history, but on the left-hand page they ignore Lou Grant’s honors in that area.
The simple fact is that each of the shows has won exactly the same number of Emmys. Twelve each.
And TV Guide doesn’t exactly tell the truth when it says “45th place is where you were likely to find Asner’s series.” Here are some Nielsen ratings. Beginning with the week of 6 January, and ending with the week of 23 May, the Nielsen standings of Lou Grant were as follows: 17/43/53/36/53/21/56/58/53/41/37/41/42/39/31/48. What you may not know, however, though these standings are about on a par with what Taxi was doing, and noticeably better most weeks of that period, is that Lou Grant does spectacularly well in the rerun months, ending up last year at something like 17th out of 108.
So hurray for Taxi at 53, but fuck you Asner with Lou Grant at 45. I couldn’t have stomped that kid to death: I wear tennis shoes.
So why, we might well ask ourselves, dealing rationally and not emotionally, does TV Guide go out of its way to fudge the facts to make Ed Asner look like what it is the White House has been telling us he is, a dangerous subversive who should not be afforded a public platform from which to spout his “soapbox bombast?”
Well, when I continue this long and step-logical series of observations next week, I will suggest some answers. Dealing with Mr. Annenberg and his chum Mr. Reagan, dealing with those of us who have survived the Me Decade, dealing with intellect as opposed to emotion, and dealing with TV Guide as a tool of the anti-intellectual worshippers of the Common Man in their heroic and unceasing crusade to keep us stupid and malleable.
But I promise I won’t get all hysterical about it.
Interim memo
Forked Stick Fury, Part 2
A little more than two years later, in the April 1984 issue of Mother Jones, Eric Nadler wrote an article titled “Guiding TV to the Right,” in which virtually everything I said in these two columns and more, was restated. I do wish he’d mentioned that an enemy of the people had said it years before he noticed it. But in the event you didn’t catch it, in the 6–12 October 84 edition of TV Guide, Ronnie’s chum Walter Annenberg takes three lugubriously written pages to make “The Case for President Reagan,” and in the News Update section on the flipside of the last page of Annenberg’s editorial we have a reprise of the endless song TV Guide sings about how unfair the networks are to Wretched Ronnie in their coverage of his epicene messages. Walter wails and moans for utter impartiality from the networks, and uses his magazine, one of the most widely-read and powerful implements for the dissemination of a political position while nobody’s aware of the hype, to promote his own favorite horse. If the damned magazine didn’t run photos of Morgan Fairchild’s naked body as frequently as they do, I swear I’d cancel my subscription.
INSTALLMENT 31: 21 JUNE 82
The Spawn of Annenberg, Part II
Snake-oil salesmen, used car dealers and television hellfire ministers understand, with a clarity that approaches satori, that wearing the cloak of innocent Good Ole Boy is a charade guaranteed to win the hearts of the easily-misled. This aw-shucks presentation, toe scuffing the dirt, cannot win the minds of the easily-misled, because for the most part the mind has been put into neutral. Pretending to an innocence that would make Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm seem like a ripe candidate for a Hustler centerspread, the dealers in deception out-Gary the late Cooper. In the hype industry it’s called disingenuousness.
[1996 INTERJECTION. TV Guide remains the Great Village Idiot of the global community. Annenberg sold the weekly (along with the pony-lover’s odds sheet) to the estimable purveyor of lowbrow yellow journalism, Australia’s own Rupert Murdoch. (I have always believed that foisting him off on us was Australia’s way of getting revenge for our trashing them in the America’s Cup race. Talk about punishment outweighing the crime.) But if we thought TV Guide was a model of disposable journalism under old Walter Annenberg, little did we suspect that it was The Canterbury Tales compared to what Murdoch hath wrought. The magazine today floats there on a breeze of idiocy, its main concerns the suppleness of Jennifer Aniston’s follicles, Drew Carey’s astrological portents, and how far up Newt Gingrich’s butt the editorial nose can be jammed so that when the axe falls, it won’t sever Rupert’s umbilical checkbook. All of which makes the point yet again that America’s most widely-read and potentially-influential reading matter does nothing to reverse the anti-intellectual bent of what we call America Today. From TV Guide we get no guidance. We ain’t asking for Teilhard de Chardin, but Jeff Jarvis!!! How wonderful: I’ve lived to see the return of the Dark Ages. And now, back to our reporter in the year 1982.]
I’ve never yet seen a City Slicker who couldn’t be fleeced, greased and decreased by some yokel-manqué from Chittling Switch, Iowa stammering his way through an elegant scam with all the bumpkin hayseed savoir-faire of the primally rapacious.
For the last thirty years that “Good Ole Boy,” Walter H. Annenberg—former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain and Northern Ireland, President of the Annenberg Foundation, Founder and President of the Annenberg School of Communications, trustee and advisory board member of more prestigious institutions than you could shake a trickle-down theory at, husband of the former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—who is also President of Triangle Publications, Inc., of Philadelphia and Radnor, Pennsylvania, publishers of Seventeen magazine and The Daily Racing Form—has been the publisher and Guiding Philosophical Intelligence behind TV Guide. At seventeen million copies sold per week, TV Guide is the largest-selling magazine in America.
TV Guide: the Partisan Review for pimplebrains.
Every week, like crabgrass, mildew and the sign-off Sermonette, TV Guide comes to millions of American homes. It is invited in with squeals of childlike delight, cosseted and cuddled like a tribble, scrutinized and well-thumbed for the multifarious joys it proffers.
Pre-Universal Pictures rules about the powers possessed by vampires make it clear that a vorwalaka must be willingly invited into a home before he can attack his victims.
Every week for thirty years, like the vorwalaka, the spawn of Annenberg has been invited into American homes where quietly, unostentatiously, toe scuffing the dirt, it has practiced its bloodsucking abilities on the intellect and good common sense of 17,000,000 × God Knows How Many unsuspecting victims.
For three decades TV Guide has been in the forefront of anti-intellectualism; it has fostered paranoia among the easily-misled about any newscaster, performer or writer who has had the bad sense to speak out against those reactionary “old time values” so dear to the charred cinder Jerry Falwell calls a heart; it has consistently painted those involved with the television medium as venal, cocaine-besotted, unpatriotic corrupters; it has lobbied against the emergence of American women with a sense of their personal manifest destiny; it has belittled social movements and those who have laid their future on the line to further those movements.
Perhaps I see dust-devils under the bed when I suggest this unfaltering editorial tone of reactionism is directly attributable to the mind of Walter Annenberg. Surely Andrew Mills and Neil Hickey and Roger Youman and the other editors of TV Guide would deny it, would rail against the image of themselves as ideologues of Annenberg, would swear an oath t
hat their views are their own. Perhaps. Yet one does not espouse contrary opinions to those held by one’s employer, at risk of finding oneself out dancing for dimes on Wilshire Boulevard.
But if this is mere conspiracy paranoia on my part, how do we rationalize a desire to believe these TV Guide writers and editors are free to think as they choose, write as they choose, with the endless examples of soft-sell reactionism passim almost every issue of the magazine?
Take a look at just the last four months’ worth of TV Guide. In the February 20 issue they ran an article ostensibly pillorying television for perpetuating the stereotype of blonde women as being brainless, big-busted instruments of male pleasure. But in the April 17 issue they ran a seemingly lightweight article by Jeff Greenfield bemoaning the demise of traditional marriage as a prototype in primetime. The piece stomps heavily on the twisted relationships of Dallas, Dynasty, Flamingo Road, et al., and whimpers for a return to the days of Ozzie and Harriet, of Beaver Cleaver’s family, of Father Knows Best. That families of such seamless wonderment existed, for the most part, only in the minds of those bitten early in life by Judge Hardy’s clan, makes no difference. Let us not have stereotyped dumb blondes, on the one hand…and let us return to the never-never land of untroubled nuclear families on the other.
Paralogia. Illogical thinking. Contravening viewpoints.
Further, in the May 8 and May 15 issues of TV Guide were to be found the two parts of a twisted polemic by Benjamin Stein in which self-determining females—such as the female reporter played by Linda Kelsey on Lou Grant—are called “desperate and angry role models.” The two articles make a not-too-subtle, often hysterical plea for women to return to those tried-and-true role models we grew up with: woman as wife, mother and lover. Forget the angst, you broads!
An Edge in My Voice Page 27